For Tekla we designed and produced the exhibition Modern Romance during 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen 2025.

The exhibition took place in the grand Banquet Hall at Charlottenborg, the home of The Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

6 beds in European walnut with spindle detailing were propped up on large podiums with pine wood flooring, showcased the new collection of Broderie Anglaise bed linen.

The beds, podiums and layout were designed by us, while the bedding collection was done by the Tekla design team.

All photos by Ludovic Balay.

Large exhibition about early 20th Century Danish sculptor Kai Nielsen, simultaneously at The Glyptotek in Copenhagen and Faaborg Museum in Southern Denmark.

The show features a large range of full-scale sculptures as well as hundreds of figurines.

The many custom-made podia and wall bases were designed with expressive mouldings, inspired by the works of the artist.

For reference, here is a photo of the sculpture “The Fåhræus Girl” shown in Kai Nielsen’s workshop.

Additionally we designed a range of sturdy tables, also inspired by the sculptor’s workshop.

For the final room of the exhibition at The Glyptotek, a huge brick table was constructed, displaying a vast range of Kai Nielsen’s figurines. The bricks were generously sponsored by Petersen Tegl.

The checkerboard brick pattern was inspired by Carl Petersen’s ceramic mosaic floors at Faaborg Museum, drawing below:

All installation photos by David Stjernholm.

For The David Collection in Copenhagen we designed this exhibition about calligraphy in the Islamic world. It showcases a vast range of ceramics, metalwork, textiles, wood-carvings among other things, all connected by their intricate use of Arabic lettering as the main decoration.

The exhibition features walls covered in textile panels through-out, with descriptive texts printed directly on the textile as well as transcribed lettering and translations of the ornamented motifs – the text becoming a decorative element in itself.

Every single object had to be carefully and individually mounted, using custom-made brass fittings, designed and produced in collaboration with conservator Mikkel Storch.

Additionally, exhibition tables and furniture were designed and built in European elm wood. This coupled with the type of textile panels also covering the walls, all from Kvadrat.

The series of wall niches carved out for the displayed objects were inspired by Islamic architecture.

The exhibition features almost 200 different objects, of varying sizes, materials, times and origins. Most of the items are from The David Collection itself.

The graphics for the show (as well as for the massive catalog produced for the occasion) were designed by Rasmus Koch Studio.

All installation photos by David Stjernholm.

Curation, conceptualization and design for a large exhibition about wickerwork – or basket-making – at Sophienholm Kunsthal, north of Copenhagen.

The show features a large range of current and historic artisans, artists and designers – all connected by their use of this ancient yet still relevant craft. The first room in the exhibition, seen above, showcases a large collection of old and new baskets by the wicker-worker and wicker-instructor Steen H. Madsen.

They range widely: there are baskets for cherries, baskets for laundry, for sewing, and for the hymn book. Baskets to be used, baskets to be coveted, baskets for decoration.

Each basket tells its own story and is simultaneously a point in a developmental history, where a basket becomes slightly more refined each time it is woven.

Included in the show are also artists who use the simple basket as a means to portray larger narratives – of immigration, of belonging, of collecting and passing on. Above and below are shown works by Young-Jun Tak and ARKO.

The value of the basket lies not in the preciousness of the material, but in the skill of the hand. A basket becomes something special only through its processing and artistic quality. Here, the basket is a good example of a new type of status marker, a resource that has changed status, namely having time.

It has become an expression of the ultimate luxury.

Shown together are works by Irish wicker legend Joe Hogan, alongside the American Deborah Needleman – a former New York Times editor who left her prestigious job to follow her new-found passion: basket-making.

All exhibition furniture, display tables, podia and shelves were designed by us. Some of it were re-purposed pieces from previous exhibitions of ours – as in the table above that we originally designed and built for an exhibition at The Hirschsprung Collection.

Throughout the exhibition we wanted to juxtapose contemporary works – some of them artworks without an actual function – with historic pieces of a more utilitarian nature. As in these pieces by Kazuhito Takadoi and Emma Bruschi coupled with an old eel-fishing basket.

Or in the case below where Ditte Gantriis’s huge basket, big enough to hold several people, is shown alongside an old “Moses basket”.

It was also a point for us to showcase a few of the Danish avant-garde artists from the 60’s and 70’s. They were among the first to re-appropriate the ancient art of basket-making and use it in a new context – that of fine arts – pointing to the already then emerging climate and biodiversity crises.

Shown here are the “Willow Monoliths” by Annette Holdensen.

And here “Peddigrørsskulptur” or simply “Rattan Sculpture” by William Louis Sørensen. (1966).

One of the most recent works in the exhibition is the above work by architect Ida Tinning – a palm leaf from The Glyptotek conservatory, woven together as a spatial sculpture – possibly hinting at a future architecture.

Another one of the less basket-like pieces is the above sculpture by Rasmus Myrup.

As a found object, it uses a well-known trope in art; here we have a particularly sculptural branch, found and brought home from the forest, adorned and processed back in the artist’s studio. It may not be a functional basket, but when does the branch, the willow, or the fiber actually become a basket?

The exhibition period was April 11 – August 25 of 2024.

Participating artists:

ARKO (1978)
Emma Bruschi (1995)
Ditte Gantriis (1980)
Joe Hogan (1953)
Annette Holdensen (1934-2023)
Steen H. Madsen
Sara Martinsen (1979)
Rasmus Myrup (1991)
Deborah Needleman (1963)
William Louis Sørensen (1942-2005)
Young-Jun Tak (1989)
Kazuhito Takadoi (1972)
Ida Tinning (1985)

All photos by David Stjernholm.

We designed this sculpture exhibition at Frederiksborg Castle, North of Copenhagen. The show concerns the continued re-carving of a series of sculptures of Greek gods in sandstone, permanently located on the facade of the inner courtyard of the castle. The original series was created by the famed Dutch sculptor Hendrick de Keyser, personally commissioned by the Danish King Christian the 4th.

Due to the delicate nature of sandstone that erodes quickly in the Danish climate, the sculptures have been re-carved several times since their first creation in the 1600s. This currently ongoing re-sculpting and re-carving is the fourth iteration of the series.

The exhibition is on display throughout a number of the castle’s historic rooms, such as the former treasury and the king’s wine cellar.

One constraint was not using wood, cardboard or paper for the exhibition elements. Instead all podia, signage, illustrations etc. were made from terrazzo, aluminum and other inorganic materials.

The different colors of terrazzo indicate which generation the sculpture mounted on top is part of. Above are seen a reddish terrazzo with red brick chips to allude to the red brick flooring of the castle; the grey-ish terrazzo uses chips of sandstone as a nod to the sandstone used in the sculptures; and the white uses limestone to achieve a light color, matching the plaster cast on top of it.

The aluminum signage was designed in collaboration with Studio Atlant, who also did all the graphics.

The exhibition will be on view for the next several years, as more and more sculptures are finished being sculpted and carved. When they are all finished, they will be installed in their individual niches on the facade.

The exhibition was curated by art historian Lejla Mrgan of The National History Museum at Frederiksborg in close collaboration with The Agency for Culture and Palaces who own the castle as well as oversee the sculpting and carving of the new sculptures.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

For Museum Kolding in Southern Denmark we produced this vision proposal about the future development of the museum and its vast collection of craft objects from all over Denmark.

The proposal includes the transformation of Staldgården, a listed building part of the larger Koldinghus Castle complex.

The vision was produced in collaboration with Have Communication with input from the museum management and staff.

Design for a large exhibition showcasing more than 100 paintings juxtaposing Dutch 17th century art with the era known as the Danish Golden Age – the first half of the 19th century – at The Nivaagaard Painting Collection.

The focus of the exhibition is the style known as “genre painting”, which as opposed to historical or religious painting depicts normal people in scenes and situations from everyday life.

Many of the paintings depict people looking through or sitting by a window. For this reason the window itself became a motif in the exhibition design, as holes in the new walls, framing the view and connecting the artworks on either side of the wall.

As the exhibition relies heavily on borrowing masterpieces from international collections, a big obstacle was securing proper safety distance between the works and the museum guests.

We turned this to our advantage and created large skirting elements along all boundary walls with an angled face to display text at a comfortable viewing angle. In the same manner, all new walls were designed with a large foot element for stability and distance, and an angled face for text display.

The many pictures are hung on the walls in a playful manner, to highlight the commonplace and often satirical situations being depicted.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

“Fynboerne – Kunsten frem for alt” / “Art Above All” about the turn-of-the-century group of painters from the Danish island of Funen at Kunstmuseum Brandts.

The show focuses on three of the central couples from the movement: The Larsens, The Swanes, and the Sybergs.

It examined the different conditions the wife and the husband would have to create their art under, and the effect this would have in their choices of motif and scale of the artworks.

The walls were painted in richly textured paints and clad with wooden strips imitating wall mouldings, to create an atmosphere apt for this specific era.

We re-discovered a range of display cabinets from the original Fyns Kunstmuseum, one of the first buildings in Denmark to be built solely for the purpose of being an art museum. A selection of letters and family photos were displayed in these.

The show was curated by Thorlak Madsen as part of a PhD research project.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

Exhibition design for the show “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction” at Rungstedlund, the historical home of Danish author Karen Blixen. The show exhibits decoupages and drawings by Her Majesty The Queen of Denmark Margrethe II.

Her Majesty The Queen designed the scenography and costumes for the 2023 Bille August feature film “Ehrengard”. The Queen created a vast number of découpages in her work for the film, as a means to visualize the fairy tale world of the Karen Blixen novella that the movie was based on.

As part of the exhibition design we designed custom book tables, frames, and easels as well as stools and benches.

All furniture was built by Rammelisten in ash wood, treated with pigmented linseed oil.

Graphic design was done by Studio Atlant.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

Design for a large exhibition about national icon Marie Krøyer at Skagens Museum and The Hirschsprung Collection.

The prevailing narrative around the turn-of-the-century artist has been that “what a pity it was that she quit painting”. And while she did quit painting, she didn’t quit creating.

Instead Marie Krøyer focused on other crafts and became, among other things, an interior designer before there even was such a term. The exhibition shines a light on exactly that by showcasing Krøyer’s furniture and interior design skills alongside her drawings.

To that end we had three exquisitely detailed architectural models built of three of Marie Krøyer’s own homes, by a team of students from Aarhus School of Architecture.

Drawing inspiration from Marie Krøyer’s signature cloverleaf motif we designed two wallpaper patterns for the exhibition. In the end, only one of them was used, hand-painted by Copenhagen Signs for the show at Hirschsprung.

The two locations of the exhibition, Skagen and Hirschsprung, had very different exhibition spaces at their disposal – one is a turn-of-the-century gallery (Hirschsprung), whereas the other is a contemporary white-cube space (Skagen). This meant that we had to come up with two very different spatial concepts for the two versions of the show.

At Skagen we wanted to do a domestic, rooms-en-suite situation, and create an intimacy which we felt was lacking in the space and would fit the theme and the artworks very well.

We designed a wall installation with door openings arranged to create a feeling of looking from one space through another and in to a room further away.

At Hirschsprung we flipped the idea on its head by painting the spaces white, thereby creating more of a clean gallery space in these otherwise richly detailed museum rooms.

We also designed cloverleaf stools that ended up not being built.

All visualizations are from the Skagen version of the show.

All photos from Hirschsprung by David Stjernholm.

The exhibition “Tradition is Contemporary” at The National Crafts Museum in New Delhi opened in November 2022 and was curated and staged by us. The show brings 13 Danish artisans, artists and designers working with textiles to India, and juxtaposes them with the museum’s vast collection of artifacts of great craftsmanship.

The exhibition showcases more than 100 years of Danish textile tradition and tries to show how dichotomies between old and new – traditional and contemporary – don’t really hold up any more. In stead we strive to showcase how objects and ideas can migrate while travelling across different cultures and times. The next big thing was in the past.

Participating artists were:

Malene Bach (1967-)
Ragna Braase (1929-2013)
Freya Dalsjø (1989-)
Bitten Hegelund (1960-)
Vibeke Klint (1927-2019)
Marie Gudme Leth (1895-1997)
Jan Machenhauer (1954-)
Margrethe Odgaard (1978-)
Anne Fabricius Møller (1959-)
Vibeke Rohland (1957-)
Ebbe Stub-Wittrup (1973-)
Paula Trock (1889-1979)
Hanne Vedel (1933)

All signage was hand-painted by Arif Khan.

The earliest pieces in the exhibition were these specimens (left, above) found in the National Archives, Copenhagen, of textile samples transported from India to Denmark on merchant’s ships between 1788-1817. The title of the show resulted from opening up these boxes of very old textiles and realizing that they all seemed so contemporary! For the show we had a few of them redone by block-printers from Rajasthan and used them throughout the space for the set design. For instance as cushions on the stools we had made, or for the binding of the catalog. The stool is based on an old Danish milking stool – re-interpreted by the museum’s team of carpenters.

Bitten Hegelund, textile-printer, above. Ragna Braase, Margrethe Odgaard, Vibeke Klint and Anne Fabricius Møller seen below.

Fashion-designer Jan Machenhauer seen above. Vibeke Klint, Malene Bach, Ebbe Stub-Wittrup and Ragna Braase seen below.

Anne Fabricius Møller, Vibeke Rohland And Bitten Hegelund above. Vibeke Rohland, Bitten Hegelund, Hanne Vedel and Paula Trock below.

Modernist textile-printer Marie Gudme Leth above. Hanne Vedel, Paula Trock, Freya Dalsjø and Ragna Braase below.

All installation views by Jeetin Sharma. Archive samples documented by Torben Eskerod.

An archaeopteryx is the first known bird species and thought to be the link between the dinosaurs and modern day birds. Only 12 known fossils exist of it. Knuthenborg Evolution Museum owns one of these, specimen no. 8, and we were asked to design a special display cabinet for it.

The finished design borrows details from the memorial stones of Danish Neo-classical sculptor Johannes Wiedevelt found on many Danish manor estates.

Covering the cabinet is a text with quotes from Darwin describing the fossil and the story behind it, hand-painted by Copenhagen Signs.

The specimen itself is mounted in a polished brass mount inside a brightly colored textile-clad cabinet space.

The cabinet was built by Rammelisten and is on permanent display at Knuthenborg Evolution Museum in on Lolland in Southern Denmark.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

Ejnar Nielsen (1872-1956) was one of the clearest Danish exponents of the artistic movement known as “Symbolism”. His paintings are often dark or bleak, depicting ill or otherwise unfortunate souls, on canvases of a monumental scale.

The Hirschsprung Collection in central Copenhagen, one of the nation’s most important museums for turn-of-the-century art, in 2022 produced a large solo exhibition for the artist, the show “Ejnar Nielsen – Signs of Life” for which we did the exhibition design.

To allow for paintings of this monumental scale, the museum moved their permanent collection out of the main halls. A new dark color-scheme was applied to all of the mouldings and wall faces. We also had a text frieze revealing passages from the artist’s love letters to his sweetheart hand-painted below the plaster cornice encompassing each room.

Symbolism was closely linked to the Danish Arts-and-Crafts equivalent movement known as “Skønvirke”. For this reason we designed stools and display tables re-interpreting Skønvirke details.

As part of the exhibition, the museum did a collaboration with The Danish Association for the Blind – many of Ejnar Nielsen’s subjects were the blind inhabitants from the village of Gjern, so throughout the exhibition are interviews with blind or visually impaired people, describing different concepts relating to blindness and visual art. To add to this, we studded the stools and display tables with text bites in Braille lettering – both as an ornamental feature, but also as an extra communicating layer for those who use their fingertips to read.

One of Ejnar Nielsen most famous works is the painting “The Blind Girl” depicting a young woman standing in front of a meandering creek set in lustrous gold leaf. To emphasize the importance of this piece we proposed gilding the wall that the painting was mounted on. The result can be seen below.

The exhibition ran from August 22 – December 15 2023.

All photos by Laura Stamer.

Exhibition concept and design for the alternative art fair AltCph. In 2018 the focus of the fair was performance art.

In close collaboration with curators Anna Weile Kjær and Esben Weile Kjær, we designed the space to mimic the quintessential art fair with a wall-to-wall carpet and a structure of temporary booths – only the walls themselves were missing, leaving just the drywall structure behind.

The exhibition was documented before and after the fact, the first set of images showing the clean structure and the props from the performances, while the second set looks like the day after a very big party.

Instead of signs or title cards a funeral-style bouquet of flowers was left at the site of each of the performances, the silk ribbon bearing the name of the artist in question.

All photos by David Stjernholm.

Sketch proposal for the 2017 Danh Vo exhibition “Take My Breath Away” at the National Gallery in Copenhagen (SMK).